Full Steam Ahead

They are like whole suburbs on the move but suburbs whose streets have shriveled to cubicles and passageways blurred with tired bodies. The 120-ton steam engines might have blundered out of a film set for Anna Karenina or a John Ford western. Almost every region of China is penetrated by them, rolling on crimson wheels through the eastern rice flats, wheezing to a near-halt in the western mountains, steaming across Inner Mongolia, Manchuria and Sichuan. With their cow catchers and round, nursery-rhyme faces, they seem to tinge the landscape less with pollution than with a painter's nostalgia.

Inside, these suburbs are patient, garrulous, gray with their smoke: a microcosm of China's new ambitions and old divides. The municipal bosses have become dumpy railway officials - guardians of vacuum flasks and floor mops - and four hierarchies of carriage announce class distinctions less obvious from the outside. Beneath the ceiling fans and shelves of teetering luggage, the poorest passengers (the huge majority) sit on hard, straight-backed seats, sometimes four abreast. They create comfort - or at least sufficiency - out of nothing.

China is the last nation on earth to manufacture such trains. In the last 30 years, the northern industrial center of Datong has produced some 5,500 steam engines, almost 70 per cent of the country's total. The models - dubbed "Liberation" or "The People" - stay in service for 30 years. They devour 100 kilograms of coal to the kilometer (China is rich in coal) and, with 3,000 horsepower, they pull as many as 55 wagons apiece.

The system has always operated in a time-warp. The first track, laid down by Jardine Matheson in 1875, was torn up by outraged officials, who supervised its demolition from sedan-chairs. The rolling stock and rails were shipped away to a Taiwanese beach, where they rusted into oblivion.

For years after the rails were eventually laid, court mandarins in what was then Peking warned that the trains' rumbling was troubling the ancestral spirits in their graves. So the lines were laid slowly, by Europeans and Japanese companies in pursuit of their own ends.

In 1949, the communists inherited a war-wracked network of 20,000 km. Today this has almost trebled. And China's peasantry, buying and selling between the provinces, has turned the railway into the most intensively traveled in the world.

The main termini are monuments to the Stalinist architecture of the 1950s. Hung with pagoda-like towers, they open on to yawning reception halls where peasant families sit among their new town-bought purchases; babies and the elderly slumped together among rope-trussed boxes of crockery, clothes and televisions.

The train seats are rigidly classified. Access to the grander classes is a government privilege, meted out according to status, but the ticket-sellers do a covert trade in fares. behind their windows they wield their small power with surly indifference.

Everything depends on status, subtly branding a traveler's dress, gait and speech. The compartment controllers, mostly girls turned pallid and short-tempered by the job, bark and bully outside each carriage door. But a flailing scrum of youths sometimes hurls them aside in the rush to find seats, bruising old men and crushing women.

In the two highest classes "soft berth" and "soft seat", government and Party officials lounge among army generals and package tourists. The signs of their privilege are discreet: breast-pocket pens, pressed shirts and Japanese watches. Many have given up their high-collared jackets and formless trousers for Western suits, and when they undress to sleep, startling floral underpants appear, or crimson long johns.

Their sealed carriages are fusty with Victoriana. lace antimacassars decorate the seats, and the double tiers of bunks - four to a carriage - are prim with embroidered pillows and duvets. Porcelain tea mugs sit on each table; a solicitous girl fills up a vacuum flask underneath. Among these elite passengers, her voice softens to an artificial sing-song. Their dignity is palpable. In the restaurant car they pay pampered attention to a mosaic of small dishes - bean curd, chicken, fish - and at night they sleep fastidiously, on their backs, uncrumpled.

But in the "hard berth" carriage, privilege and pomposity dwindle in tandem. The passengers are teachers, doctors, minor officials and a few students. their steel-framed bunks rise six to a cubicle and at night the dimly lit passage alongside reverts to an aisle of thinly stockinged feet and snoring heads.

The vast majority endure their journey, sometimes two days long, in the jigsaw of baggage and bodies called "hard seat". On the most crowded trains the passageways become a rink of spittle and cigarette ash. At night people doze bolt upright in ranks, their children asleep like ornaments in their arms, or lay their quilted overcoats or newspapers on the floor, where they lie interlocked and gaunt as refugees, grinning at the ceiling.

As dawn comes, the loudspeakers overhead stir them awake with news bulletins and lilting pop songs. Everyone is still tired. Among them, the rare foreigner's freedom is observed with puzzled surprise. He is machine-gunned by practical questions: "Where is England?", "How much do you earn?", "How many pigs do you own?"(And behind your back, perhaps, with murmured astonishment: "He is very hairy", "Why are his eyes so deep-set?", "Where is his group?") But eventually they share their green tea, their "convenience noodles" softened in boiling water and sometimes (if no on e else is listening) a little of their lives.

Outside, the land may barely have altered since the previous evening: the paddy-fields broken by hills, perhaps, or the hills eroded a little, or the desert shadowed by mountains. But in a nation as huge and diverse as this, the changes go deep. People are tied to city or village by residence permits (or lack o them); and many work compulsorily far from the province of their birth. So beyond the carriage window, the altering land means exile or homecoming, and the train threads through it with a strange cargo of relief, fear and reconciliation.

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